47 Scrum Master Interview Question and Answer

Question 1: When is the suitable time to use Agile Methodology and is this suitable for all the situations?

When:

• We have complex project
• When Requirement is not clear
• Quick launch of Product
• Emphasise on Teamwork, Transparency & Continuous improvement.
• No limit of time and Budget
• No need to deliver full software at once.

Question 2: What are the four values of Agile Software Development describe in Agile Manifesto?

• Individual and Interaction – over Process and Tools
• Customer Collaboration – over contract Negotation
• Working Software – Over Comprehensive documentation
• Responding to Change – Over Following a plan.

Question 3: What are the major principle of Agile Project Management?

There are 12 Agile Principles:

1. Meet Customer Needs
2. Welcome Changes
3. Continuous Feedback
4. Good Teamwork
5. Focus on Active Processes
6. Face to Face Talk
7. Motivate the People
8. Sustainable Development
9. Technical Excellence
10. Be Simple
11. Self Organised
12. Adust Strategies

Question 4: What are the Difference between Agile Methodology and Waterfall Model?

Question 5: What are the drawback of Agile Model?

• Very limited documentation.
• Project can easily go off Track.
• Difficult to measure progress.

Question 6: What are the other Agile framework apart from Scrum?

• LEAN
• KANBAN

Question 7: What are the user story and what is the structre of good user story?

A User Story is an explanation of Software features written from the end user perspective.

A good Story can look like this:

• From Marketing data Analyst point – I need to run a google analytics report so that I can build the montly media campaign plan.
• Credit Card Holder, I want to view my balance statement so that I can pay my dues.

Question 8: What are the feature a good User story should have?

• It includes description
• Must have acceptance criteria defined.
• Can be delivered within single sprint.
• Has performance criteria defined
• Has tracking criteria defined
• is Estimated by the Scrum Team

Question 9: What is SCRUM. What are the benefits of SCRUM. Can we use this for all type of Projects?

Scrum is an Agile Framework. It is lightweight and simple to understand and difficult to Master.

Benefits of Scrum:

• Accelerate Software Delivery.
• Ehnance Software Quality.
• Enhance ability to manage changing priorities.
• Reduce project risk.
• Reduce Project cost

Question 10: Is there any difference between Agile and SCRUM?

Agile: is an iterative approach towards the completion of a Project.

Scrum: is a lightweight framework that is used to implement the Agile Philosophy.

Question 11: What is SCRUM Sprint and ideal duration of Sprint?

Sprint: is a timebox of one month or less in which the team produces a shippable product increment. The ideal duration is 2-4 weeks depending on the complexity of the projects.

Question 12: What is the Role of SCRUM ?

SCRUM TEAM: works together to ensure the quick resolution of issues.

Product Owner: Maximizing the value of the product.

Scrum Master: Responsible for helping everyone in the Team understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values.

Development Team: A group of self-organized and cross-functional people who do development, testing of the products.

 

Question 13: What are the SCRUM Artifacts?

SCRUM Artifacts: these are designed to maximize the transparency of key information so that everybody has the same understanding of the artifacts.

Product Backlog: This is an ordered list of everything that is needed in the Product.

Sprint Backlog: This is the set of product pending items that team commits to achieve in a given Sprint.

Product Increment: It is the total of all the completed items from the backlog during the sprint.

Question 14: What are the different events that take place during the Scrum Process?

• Sprint Planning – Plan the work and define the sprint goal.
• Daily Scrum – Everyday 15 minutes times for to inspect the development team progress.
• Sprint Review – At the end of sprint Scrum team and stakeholders inspect the increment and product backlog
• Sprint Retrospective – In this Sprint Team reflects how things went during the previous sprint and areas of improvement in the sprint.

Question 15: Can you name some of the tools used in Scrum Project?

• JIRA , Versonone, Scrumwise, ScrumDo, ZohoSprint

Question 16: Explain the Emprical Process Control and how Scrum framework is based on that?

Emprical Process Control – Empiricism means working in a fact based, experince based and evidence based manner.

Scrum Framework is based on

• Transparency – To know what is going on
• Inspection – Check your work as you do it
• Adaptation – OK to change the tactic direction.

Question 17: Have you heard of Scrum-ban? if yes, can you please explain what it is?

• SCRUMBAN – Is a project management framework that combines important feature of two popular agile methodologies: Scrum and Kanban.

Question 18: What are the cases where Scrum is not suggested?

• When Requirement are not allowed to evolve.
• When Organization is not ready to adopt agile values and practices.
• When people already have bad experience with Scrum.

Question 19: What should be the ideal size of Scrum Team?

• Ideal size for the development team should be 3-9 exclusing Scrum Master and Prodcut Owner.

Question 20: What are the drawback of Scrum?

• Challenging
• Experience Matters
• Difficult to scale
• Frustrated Team
• Frequent Changes
• Uncertainty
• No Set Deadlines

Question 21: Some of metrics used by the Scrum Team to measure the work done?

• Sprint Goal Success
• Team Velocity
• Sprint Burn down
• Time to Market
• ROI
• Customer Satisfaction

Question 22: What is timeboxing in the Scrum framework?

• Timeboxing is the fixed alloted time for a particular activity
• Sprint – Consist of Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective.

Question 23: What is the purpose of Daily Scrum Meeting? Is it mandatory for the Scrum Master to attend Daily Scrum?

• Daily Scrum is 15 minutes time box event for the development team that take place every day during the sprint. meeting consist of What did you do yesterday, What will you do Today, Is there any impediment.
• Its not mandatory for Scrum master to attend daily meeting he and she can just schedule meeting.

Question 24: What is the Sprint Burndown Chart?

• Sprint Burndown – is graphical way of representation how much work is pending in Sprint. in term of Task hours.

Question 25: What does the term velocity mean in Scrum?

• Velocity is an extremely simple, powerful method for accurately measuring the rate at which Scrum development teams consistently deliver business value.

Question 26: What is the role of Scrum Master in Scrum retrospective?

• Scrum Master acts as an peer team member in retrospective. He/She plays the role of facilitator for the Scrum Team.

Question 27: What is the Scrum of Scrums?

• It is a daily meeting where multiple scrum master and chief product owner meet to discuss their work progress. It is same as Daily Scrum however focus on a Team level.

Question 28: What is a Storyboard in Scrum?

• It is a visual representation of progress of a software project which generally has four columns namely [TO DO, IN PROGRESS, TEST and DONE].

Question 29: What happens during a sprint review?

• A sprint review is held at the end of the Sprint to inspect check the product increment and update the product backlog.
• The Scrum Team and stakeholders colloborate about what was done in the Sprint.
• Based on the feedback they update the Product Backlog.

Question 30: What is discussed during the sprint planning meeting?

• During the Sprint planning Scrum Team collaborate and discusses the work that needs to be performed in the Sprint.
  • What can be delivered in the Sprint iteration?
  • How to achieve that works?

Question 31: What are the other event in Scrum apart from planing, review and retrospective?

• Product Backlog Refinement – in this Product owner and Team discussed about the Product backlog and perform below activites.
  • Removing irrelevent user stories.
  • Creating new user stories according to new needs.
  • Assign estimates to stories.
  • Collect extimates based on new information.

Question 32: Who is Scrum Master and what does he do?

• Scrum Master act as Coach, Mentor and Teacher and generally do the following activites.
  • Organizing meetings.
  • Deals with the challenges.
  • Help the Team to understand the Scrum theory, Practices, Rules and value etc.
  • Enable efficient Communication & Collaboration

Question 33: What quality skills do you need to become a great Scrum Master?

• a Good Listener
• Be Observant
• Be Influential
• Acquire Knowledge
• Protect the Team
• Leadership Skills.

Question 34: How Scrum master help to the Product Owner?

• Promoting Scrum event requested by the Product Owner.
• Help Product owner in Backlog Management.
• Help Product owner to understand agile Princilples and Practices.
• Help the Scrum Team in adopting a shared vision.

Question 35: How Scrum master help to the Organization?

• Acts as an Change agent and facilitate the change.
• Helps to Increase the Productivity of the Scrum Team.
• Support Agile Leadership Princilples and Practices.
• Plan Scrum implementation within the Organization.

Question 36: As a Scrum Master how you are going to demonstrate Servant leadership?

• Should not blindly follow directions.
• Loyal with the Team and win their trust.
• Guide the development Team towards self organization.
• Acoid the conflict and issues in the team.

Question 37: What will you do when Scrum Team don’t like your ideas and they suggest new idea?

• Always open for suggestion
• Don’t accept idea blindly
• Request for reasonable explanation
• If everyone in the Team agree with that you can replace the idea.
• If you think idea is not good you can reject politly and explain them what are the issues in their ideas.

Question 38: What would you do when realize that Team memeber is breaking agile principles?

• Try to understand why he/she is not following the agile principles
• Mentor the individual and explain the agile philosophy and Principle to them breaking the rules are distrupting the development progress
• If issue is not resolved setup a meeting with his/her reporting manager to talk about the concern and search for ways to help the team member.

Question 39: How you help your team to work on most important user stories first?

• Include them in the initial planning phase when stories are created.
• Additial Training
• Pair Programming

Question 40: Due to some reasons you are not meeting the commitments and velocity is unstable. what could be the possible reasons and how you are going to solve those issues?

• New member in the Team
• Team member leaving organization.
• Seniority in the Team can be an issue.
• Working with undocumented.
• Unnecessarily Holiday and Sick leave.

Question 41: How you will identify the improvment area?

• Be open minded
• Deep dive with the feedback and suggestion.
• Organise seminar and conferences to gather knowledge.

Question 42: How you will handle Scrum and remote Team?

• Relevent and interesting status upate.
• Discussion on Team Performance
• Building a great relatonship and create a great team culture.
• Slack/ Zoom Meeting can be a good tool for video call with distributed Team.

Question 43: last day you recieved a story that has a defects how you will handle this to make it done?

• This story has defects so we can make this partially done and move to the next Sprint.

Question 44: What are the other business apart from Softwaere development where we can use Agile Methodology?

• Biophysics
• Biochemistry
• Biomedical
• Manufacturing
• Supply Chain Management

Question 45: How you will identify the sucess of Agile Practices Sucess in your organization?

• Every organization define their own criteria to evaluate their sucess but there is no specific tool. however you can check the following.
  • Customer retention rate
  • Team member review
  • Stakeholder’s participation

Question 46: How you will communicate with your Team?

• Serve as excellent servant leaders without being authoritative.
• Drive the development Team towards Success.

Question 47: What is Anti Patterns during the Sprint?

• Lack of Support
• Defining Technical Solutions
• Assigning Sub Task to developers
• Flow Disruption
  • Not discussing negative impact with the stakeholder.
  • Not taking in loop line manger while assigning task to team members.